Steam Passes 6 Million Simultaneous Users

After hitting five million users at the beginning of the year, Valve announced Steam has passed six million concurrent users this week. This is, of course, boosted by their seasonal Steam sale, pulling in users for ridiculous deals of half-priced new releases and five-dollar anthologies, but it’s a steady increase from the previous record regardless. While the sale certainly boosts those numbers, it isn’t solely responsible; Steam’s Stats page shows (at the time of this writing) the top games as DOTA2, a free to play title, and Football Manager 2013, which isn’t even on sale currently.

Microsoft has been a little more coy with their simultaneous user stats, choosing instead to announce when a game release sends the user count skyrocketing without announcing the actual numbers. A press release following Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 had announced 3.3 million users, but Activision later had to retract the statement and correct it with 1.4 million, so maybe Microsoft is careful with those numbers for a reason.

While this certainly isn’t a contest between the two services, numbers like these provide plenty of evidence that, despite the yearly (weekly?) proclamations around the gaming world, PC gaming is not dead or stagnant, and that it’s not leaving us anytime soon.